Current editor-in-chief of The Verge, Nilay Patel, has a short essay out:
‘The people do not yearn for automation’,
by Nilay Patel, The Verge, 2026-04-24.
To quote from the opening:
Software brain is powerful stuff. It’s a way of thinking that basically created our modern world. Marc Andreessen, the literal embodiment of software brain, called it in 2011 when he wrote the piece “Why software is eating the world” as an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. But software thinking has been turbocharged by AI in a way that I think helps explain the enormous gap between how excited the tech industry is about the technology and how regular people are growing to dislike it more and more over time.
The entire piece is worth the fifteen or so minutes it takes to read.
But a comment appended to the essay, by poetryforsupper also caught my eye:
[T]he term software brain is a timely and fitting translation for the longstanding philosophical problem of reification, or what Alfred North Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, that is, the problem of confusing an abstraction for a concrete entity or event. Or, as Alfred Korzybski more plainly says, the map is not the territory.
Maps and models of all kinds most certainly give us access to the world at hand. And, when we orient ourselves properly to these maps and models, they even grant us a certain kind of agency within the world. But confusing our data about the world with the world itself is nothing more than a naïve scientism.
A concise and clear reminder that Patel’s essay is, among other things, a contemporary re-statement of Alfred Korzybski’s most famous epistemological argument.
This is not to dismiss or diminish Patel’s particular argument at all.
But — and to invoke Koheleth, which just makes this post even more meta — the intellectual and semantic connection between Patel’s argument and Korzybski’s epistemological point, made almost a century ago,¹ sheets home both their points all the more forcefully.
The file-cards not only are not reality, they cannot be reality. The fundamental interconnectedness of everything makes it impossible for a description to either be the thing described or be entirely separate from the thing described.
- Said argument was first made in Korzybski’s 1931 paper ‘A non-Aristotelian system and its necessity for rigour in mathematics and physics’. This paper was reprinted in his 1933 magnum opus, Science and sanity: an introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics).